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Marxist Radicals Mug Paul Ryan

The Alinskyites bring out their ground game.

The same Marxist agitators who tried to silence Mitt Romney in the Hawkeye State a year ago tried to shut down his new running mate Monday.

Two days after the presumptive GOP presidential nominee named Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his vice presidential pick, Ryan was aggressively heckled by the agrarian socialists and union goons of the ACORN-like Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI) throughout a stump speech at the Iowa State Fair.

At last year’s Iowa State Fair members of Iowa CCI badgered and berated Romney, shrieking and interrupting him as he attempted to share his views on reforming entitlement programs like Social Security. They baited Romney into making his arguably impolitic admission that “corporations are people.”

Left-wing activists call this “accountability,” an Orwellian euphemism. Accountability, as the term is used by leftists, is not about transparency or good government. Perhaps partly inspired by the father of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, who was in favor of silencing non-leftists, accountability actions focus on harassing and intimidating political enemies, disrupting them and forcing them to waste their campaign resources dealing with activists’ provocations.

After Iowa CCI activists loudly demanded Ryan halt the “war on the poor” they perennially accuse Republicans of waging, these broken records of the Left bragged about the trouble they caused as they “challenge[d] Ryan on vitally important issues to everyday Iowans.”

They claimed victory over the congressman, declaring they shaved 30 percent off his speaking time. “Ryan spoke for only twelve minutes, well under his allotment of twenty.”

Several protesters were removed from the event by police. One Iowa CCI activist even reportedly punched a Romney-Ryan volunteer during the speech. Of course the use of physical violence on opponents is an important tactic for the community organizer, as Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky admitted to his protégé Nicholas von Hoffman.

Although friendly reporters use the adjectives progressive and liberal to describe Iowa CCI, Marxist or neo-communist are more appropriate descriptors.

Iowa CCI has been praised by Bill Moyers and labeled the “Most Valuable Grassroots Advocacy Group” of 2009 by John Nichols of The Nation magazine. Nichols approves of the group’s “in-your-face activism.”

Iowa CCI has also received grants from the Unitarian Universalist Church’s Veatch Foundation. Grants from that charity were used to found the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) in 1986. Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, the ACORN-loving former community organizer, was previously president of the IATP. Ritchie orchestrated Al Franken’s theft of incumbent Republican Norm Coleman’s U.S. Senate seat in the 2008 election cycle.

Iowa CCI is part of a larger Alinsky-inspired organizing network called National People’s Action (NPA). NPA makes no bones about its desire to overthrow what remains of America’s free enterprise system.

“The banking crisis is the next big thing,” Goehl said in 2010 at the left-wing Campaign for America’s Future conference. “The banking crisis is the way to build a big economic justice movement in this country,” Goehl said.

“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity as progressives to engage millions of Americans in a big conversation around serious economic restructuring, not around eking out some victories around the margins, not about making life a little less worse for people, but about big time transformative change.”

If you build a platform for revolution, the angry masses will do the rest, Goehl said.

“If we create a space for people to come out they want to come out,” he said. “People are ready to move to the streets, some because they’re angry, some because they want justice right now, and some because they’re tired of hearing about the Tea Party coming out.”

Like ACORN, Iowa CCI blackmails lenders using the financial affirmative action law known as the Community Reinvestment Act. The organization brags about being the first group to use the law to “negotiate family farm loan agreements with banks.”

NPA worked with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, and ACORN’s new front groups across America in an economic terrorism campaign aimed at the financial services sector.

You might remember the joint actions conducted by NPA and SEIU. The two organizations have used angry mobs to invade banks and terrorize bank executives, such as Bank of America’s Greg Baer, in their homes.

That’s what the modern American version of the storm trooper, the community organizer, does.

And that’s what the community organizers of Iowa CCI will continue to do.